


two enigmas.

by jjwritesthings



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Afterlife, Blood and Injury, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Chess Metaphors, Dead TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF), Dead Wilbur Soot, I guess a little introspection, I was upset when i wrote this, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Introspection, Mentioned Technoblade (Video Blogging RPF), Metaphors, Poetic, Wilbur Soot and Technoblade and TommyInnit are Siblings, Wilbur Soot and TommyInnit are Siblings, sorta a rant I guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:08:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29923563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jjwritesthings/pseuds/jjwritesthings
Summary: The problem with enigmas and stars is that they do not die, they do not stop living, they do not give up until the very last second. Every moment is spent burning and shining and living until there is nothing left but the spark at the end, or the big bang, or the silent goodbye.___Wilbur's journey of loss and gain.
Relationships: Jschlatt & Wilbur Soot, Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25





	two enigmas.

**Author's Note:**

> I started this last week and shit's already happened I really can't keep up with this fsdghmgbfxv
> 
> so...I started to write this as some sort of character study and rant of Tommy's death, but because I had behind 5 layers of metaphors it turned into a fic, what a surprise.
> 
> also just a small tw! there is discussion and description of injuries and blood, just to warn ya
> 
> anyways, enjoy :D

It starts and ends with two enigmas.

It starts and ends with two brothers with hearts and minds too full, and hands and promises too empty.

It starts with a tree, a bench, and the words of safety in a small van. The world is nothing but an oyster to some and a canvas to others. A playground for two brothers, a chess game for another. Youth is still young and war is nothing but a story to tell from a history book. The walls are a foot high and you can climb it with just your bare hands, and the safety line is black and yellow blocks, with jokes about ‘who is’ and ‘who isn’t’ getting thrown around like a volleyball. The world was an oyster, but there was a flood coming.

The world is made in fire, blood and anguish. A man with a dream drags his brother along because he’s really still a kid, just like him. He plays with fire and words because the world is now his stage, he feels the limelight glow in his face and he looks the other way to see if others are watching. The hero falls and gets up, and a tragedy is made out of him, the villain copies him because he knows nothing but to keep following what you hate. 

Hate and love, two sides of the same coin.

What makes a tragic hero? Is it because the audience knows more, dramatic irony swirling through their minds? Is it because the hero isn’t right anymore? A tragic hero is born out of a good man, planted inside of him by the god of chaos, and we watch him dance like a dunce. We laugh at him and with him, the relatability of a tragic hero, a tragic villain, a tragic man driving himself to the fire.

It starts and ends with enigmas and chain reactions.

A bullet of empty past promises ricochets and bounces off the walls of a dusty ravine. It is quiet down here, it is silent. The whispers never stop and the building of a grave is underway with the person to hit the last nail in his coffin walking the corridors like there is no tomorrow. A brother watches him with a fire rolling around him. The brothers started off with the same fire of hope, but only one stayed on the wire, the other burning himself away into ash, into soot.

Soot is a word Wilbur wished he wasn’t so quite literally acquainted with.

Half of his memories are full of ash and fire, blood smeared across cheeks and matches under his foot, under his thumb, stretching himself thin and burning himself up for the thrill and excitement of it, for the promise of taking back what was his. His soul, full and bold and carrying a fire so strong it seemed impossible to put out. Throwing words of poets and philosophers out like it was nothing but his daily speech, debating others and winning with his words like it was his bread and butter.

It made him feel unstoppable in a world made to break him. The rush of seeing an almost god have to compromise with you because you were  _ stubborn _ , well- it was addicting. So he did it, again and again, riling Dream on because he was enjoying the games he was playing. 

But they were playing two different games. Wilbur liked to gamble, he was a wildcard based on loud first moves and extravagant impulsive aces, kings, jokers. He was predictably unpredictable, walking a wire with no care for balance. Dream though- was always two moves ahead, the fucker. Dream seemed to be a fan of chess, a more long-time player, a long-time thinker, he liked to watch his little game unfold as his pawns moved on and on, the clock ticking away as the sand timer ran out.

So the world moves on and Dream carries it in one hand, toying with it, while he holds a scepter in the other. Wilbur watches a king and a god have his fun like a spoiled kid. There was a spitting and sputtering fire lurking in him, gunpowder and lies and deception. Blood and mind and tragedy. He never really knew when his game got serious. Gambling was supposed to be fun and light.

The world turns and the weight settles in.

The atmosphere of Pogtopia suffocated everything that lived there. Fires were born and died there, food barely survived, and the souls and hearts of everyone living there felt the pressure of the world and war tilt their head sideways, earthquake after earthquake as the political playground became a garden full of landmines. Wilbur’s playground, his stage, became a bed of dead roses. 

Tommy tries to keep the garden alive.

And so it goes like this:

A promise is made when two brothers are young and naïve. The tree, the bench, the van. They watch as their small world, warm home, big idea, rises and falls, from ash like a phoenix, to the fall like Rome. They watch as their enigmas flicker in the sky and the minutes past, the sun coming too late as it shines on a crater, only a whisper of promises left. This would not be the last time.

Wilbur watches his body and mouth do the talking. His mind and soul, disconnected from this human being he’s supposed to possess, supposed to have, supposed to be in control of. He sees from his eyes and speaks from his mouth but it isn’t his, and he tries to fight a battle to win himself back in those meekly seconds and loses. Madness is the artist’s greatest friend after all. Wilbur let himself become the character, nothing would let him leave the stage now. Wilbur let himself become the puppet of an extravagant show and a god pulls the strings.

Nothing's fair in love and war.

He watches the sky and finds his eyes trailing to a brother distant to the world, distant to himself and to him. Techno watches him idly in thought through strands of pink hair, and Wilbur cracks a smirk in response. He feels as if the world is pulling him to make the moves, not him. Like a magnet in his skin, everything heavy, everything wrong. He says the words of kindness and a bent-back promise to Tommy and his younger brother looks him in the eye and hands him back the card. The ace is once again in his hand and with cowardice he tries to put the weight of his world into another young hand. 

Wilbur sees himself as a star. Dying, dead, yet still shining. Still shining because the world refuses to let him go, Tommy and Phil refuse to let him go, Fundy and Niki refuse to let him go, he dies and keeps shining, because the world refuses to move on and let him go.

He pats Tommy’s shoulder and gives a soft smile. 

“I’ll be back soon,”

And he walks knowing the world will end and begin again.

___

Wilbur didn’t think it’d be so soon.

He played his part and the lights went dark, the limelight left and the leaflets melted away in the puddles. He soon became an afterthought to many, a dark whisper when you spill secrets buried deep beneath the surface. He became more dangerous in some ways, when resting, he became feared in a way.

There was a reason he never got a grave.

Tommy never moved on. The problem with enigmas and stars is that they do not die, they do not stop living, they do not give up until the very last second. Every moment is spent burning and shining and living until there is nothing left but the spark at the end, or the big bang, or the silent goodbye. We watch the stars dance across the night sky, a space and ocean above untouchable. The moon is hung in the sky as an apology. The sun must sleep, the sun must rest, but the sun would be back. Temporary apologies and the promise of light to come.

Wilbur watched Tommy grow into a soldier faster than anyone he’s ever met. In months he was on the front lines, and he was playing the game of war alongside him. His eagerness ended with an arrow to his head, his eagerness ended with his home broken into ash and dust. Wilbur thinks the childishness lives on, buried deep beneath layers of lies and secrets, underneath cracked promises and dark truths.

Wilbur watches from afar, unable. His brother grows into a stranger as the months pass, a young soul smothered in the smoke and destruction, his heart and passion hanging by a thread as Dream plays his game. The walls are built and broken, a nation hangs in balance as the stars weep, comets overhead. The chess pieces move and are taken from the board, the world keeps spinning. Wilbur was chaos wrapped in passion and love, he played his game of gambling fairly. Yet he watches a cheater slip from his fingers and roll a weighted dice.

In a game, there is a winner and a loser. There is the foreit and there is the reward. There are the honest and there are the liars. Some have everything and some have nothing, some hurt, some heal, some die and some rise.

He watches the enigma start to die out, unable and powerless. Wilbur doesn’t get many chances to see his friends and the world he once walked, it is the blessing and curse of death and your soul being tied to a place where he couldn’t escape. He thought death would give him freedom, the chance to walk and run without strings attached, but the Life and Death were nothing but cruel, it didn’t make a difference if it was on earth or in the afterlife. He was stuck, nothing to do but watch everything play out and burn again. Maybe this was his punishment.

He couldn’t decide which place he liked better, the lush of the overworld or the emptiness of the afterlife. The earth was so loud and so hushed, a flurry of hurried whispers and rush of explosions, one after another after another. The expanse of the void, the afterlife he was forcefully tied to through death and mortality, so empty, so silent and quiet, only a place for staying and waiting, waiting for someone else to join them here.

Wilbur didn’t have to wait long. Schlatt had told him upon arriving into the afterlife that he had felt something, a feeling of some sort of space growing bigger and bigger when someone was to join them here, in the void. 

“Is it painful?” He had asked, still a little overwhelmed by his own death. His father, the sword, the show. He had been on the stage dying a poetic, tragic death, and he had a full audience. A churn in his stomach told him that it probably wasn’t something to be proud of.

“Well-” Schlatt dragged on. “-no, it isn’t. But it isn’t exactly pleasant either. You feel a sort of drop, y’know? Like when you’re scared, I guess,” Schlatt fumbled, lazily explaining to Wilbur with a small struggle.

He must have looked nervous, because Schlatt cut in again. “But it’s sorta- man how do I explain it- fuckin weird afterlife shit-” He pinched his nose and scrunch up his face, brows furrowed. After a couple moments he spoke again. “Look, I haven’t been here long so I barely know anything, but it’s this feeling- when someone’s gonna come here, you know they’re comin’, even if you’re miles away from...wherever it is we are,” he gestured his hands in front of him, flailing them about a bit. 

He was still processing everything that had happened in the ten minutes he had found himself in this simple yet complex white space, this empty void, that he just stayed silent, contemplating everything.

“Must have been excited to know that I was here then?” he joked after some minutes of silence.

“Oh fuck off loverboy,” Wilbur barked a laugh at that, and soon Schlatt was joining him.

___

He thought he had all the time in the world to think about it, and in retrospect, he still did. 

But soon he felt that shift, that feeling, so deadly and such a weight on his heart that he thought he might suffocate. He had spent a good amount of time now in this place with Schlatt and a slightly recent member in the form of a parody version of Dream- though this one was a lot tamer and tolerable. This one wore dark greens, whites and reds along with the signature bright green that Wilbur had seen the original adorn wherever he went. This one wasn’t a lying, cheating bastard. This one didn’t hurt anyone.

Spending more time in the void had made him gain knowledge about certain things. Mostly about the arrival of others, how exactly the place he now lived in worked, the systems, or well- the ambiguity of them. Because as much as he had spent quite a bit of time here now- though time was hard to keep track of here- it was hard to discover anything new about the afterlife, except from what you had experienced. It had made him think a lot about the system of this place, probably a bit too much.

He couldn’t think right now though. He found himself shuddering on the ground, knees and hands supporting him weakly as he reacted to the weight on his heart, the suffocating feeling making him panic and spiral into a heavy breathing mess on the floor. He felt his mind and body close in on himself, a crushing and pushing force into his chest, and he choked out a sob as he doubled over in pain.

What the hell was happening? Why did it hurt so much?

Then he felt the drop.

He didn’t realise he was running until he could feel that he was stumbling over himself. He was rushing to somewhere that wasn’t clear to him, but his feet kept forcing him forward and he sprinted as hard as he could to his destination. He felt himself slipping and tripping but he didn’t stop, even though his breathing got heavier and his vision was blurring, he kept running, he kept hurting. 

As he moved in closer, he saw a small body covered in red flicker in and out of reality, the form jerking and thrashing, silently screaming as they took one invisible punch and kick after the other. Wilbur watched in still-stock horror, his knees trembling and almost giving out, his body and his mind both screaming at him, telling him that  _ something is wrong, someone is getting hurt, someone is in pain, you need to help, do something- anything. _ He shakily finds his way kneeling towards the body, which was now shaking less violently, and only shuddering slightly. The flickering was becoming less and less frequent, but the body started to become more corporeal. 

They looked so frigid, so weak and cold. So broken and small, unable to defend themselves as they slowly stopped moving, almost as if they were freezing in time. The body was silent in what Wilbur assumed was their death, cold and immobile, the last of what warmth of life left in them leaving. Wilbur felt the drop hit.

_ ‘It doesn’t hurt’ _ Wilbur remembered Schlatt saying.  _ Fucking bullshit. Schlatt, the dirty, lying bastard. _

This hurt more than anything else.

The hurt was in the realisation of who exactly is lying in front of him. The hurt was in what must have been the cause of death.

The cause of Tommy’s end.

He sat on his knees next to the unstirring body of Tommy, unsure of what to do but look on in horror and confusion, taking in the bloody sight of the younger boy. He looked so unbelievably small, so unlike what he knew Tommy to normally be, or who he was supposed to always be. This wasn’t supposed to happen, Tommy was supposed to keep going because he was so stupidly stubborn it kept him alive, he wasn’t supposed to be here, no- not this young and this small- this all felt so wrong, something so flawed, there must have been some sort of mistake-

Tommy shot up suddenly with a gasp, which slowly dissolved into a coughing fit. Wilbur rushed to his side, holding the blonde and rubbing his back as Tommy continued to virtually dry heave, his already small body curling in to make himself even smaller. Wilbur tried to calm him down and hushed him as the coughing came down, whilst also forcing not to choke up himself, still overwhelmed from what he had just seen. What Tommy had just been through, it dawned on him just afterwards.

“Fucking hell,” Tommy said before Wilbur could say anything first himself, and considering he was on the brink of breaking down, that was probably for the best.

“Tommy…” he was at a loss for words, he didn’t know how to start.

Tommy turned to him with a crooked smile, sporting ugly bruises left and right of his face, which was accompanied with a split lip now scabbed and blood still dripping from his head, dying his dirty blonde hair a sickly red. It was hard to look at him, but Wilbur managed. 

“Hey Wilbur,”

“Tommy, what...how...” Wilbur was distraught, trying to string together a sentence and failing again. “What happened?”

Tommy’s smile quickly dropped, and a solemn expression took over. He turned away from where he was facing Wilbur, looking off to somewhere distant, out of reach. “I died didn’t I? Isn’t that obvious?”

Wilbur gave a small snort in reply to try and lighten the mood, but he pressed on. “I mean how Tommy- what was going on?”

He watched Tommy tense slightly, his eyes shifting up and down a little before settling to stare at his own shifting feet. They sat in an uneasy silence as Wilbur waited patiently for Tommy to start again. “Dream. It was him, always fucking him-” Tommy starts up again, but is cut off as he starts to choke up. 

Wilbur’s throat tightened. “Oh Tommy,” and before long Tommy is in Wilbur’s arm, telling him the whole ordeal of the events leading up to his most untimely death.

Wilbur’s seen and done a lot in his life, he’s experienced many things and gone further than most, well- he did build a country of course, so there’s that. He blew it up, sure but- it was for the best. For everyone, for Tubbo, Fundy, Niki. For Tommy.

He holds Tommy in his arms as the younger continues to tell his story through many tears and sobs, and he starts to have second thoughts.

Wilbur had always thought that he was doing the right thing for everyone, the best thing for the whole country, for his people. The only problem was that he was stubborn, and so he never grew past that when he was alive. Wrong just wasn’t in his vocabulary, he refused it to be. He fixed the world and the games he played so that he was rigged in his favour. The game was rigged from the start though, and he was simply the catalyst.

**_‘Everyone thinks they’re right from their perspective.’_ **

**_‘No- you’re wrong.’_ **

Wilbur’s stubbornness got him killed in the end. He had just hoped it hadn’t been the same for Tommy. He had hoped that it was what would have kept him alive.

For a long time, it had. But they lived in a cruel world where forgiveness was scarce and patience was scarcer.

By the time Tommy was finished telling his tale, Wilbur had remembered what it had been like for him when he first arrived here, to this void, this blissful empty afterlife. Though, it wasn’t blissful really, it was only some form of escape, and some form of punishment. Though, he feels like he deserved it, in hindsight. He felt like he was being torn apart from the inside out when he first arrived, his whole soul being ripped to shreds and dissolved into nothingness, only for it to all be smashed together again in some sort of twisted game of piecing a puzzle together again, all in the wrong places and somehow still fitting.

“You look like shit,” Tommy quipped after Wilbur was done crushing him with a hug.

He pulled away from Tommy, hand on the boy’s shoulders, eyeing him up and down. “You’re one to talk,” Tommy only laughed, and then smiled, looking up to meet Wilbur once again.

“I missed you, you know? I mean like,  _ you _ , Wilbur. Not whoever the fuck I had in that shithole ravine,”

Wilbur winced at the comment. “Ouch, that hurt,”

“You deserve it,” Tommy replied nonchalantly.

“Fair,”

Tommy shifted in Wilbur’s embrace as they fell into a more comfortable silence. The air felt a little softer now, a little more at ease as they simply basked in each other’s embrace. It was quiet, but it didn’t hurt. 

Wilbur felt Tommy’s head stir a little more, and he looked down to find a nervous expression painted across his brother’s face. “What’s up?” he prodded.

“I feel weird,” Tommy said almost immediately.

“Yeah..I get that. I felt like that when-”  _ When I died _ , he wanted to say.

“I feel like- like I’m not supposed to be here,”

He tightened his arms around Tommy. He selfishly didn’t want him to go. He had Tommy again, here, together with him. He didn’t want to lose him again. 

He didn’t voice any of that, however, and simply replied with a hum.

Tommy only huffed, clearly not satisfied with Wilbur’s lack of reply. “Maybe I’m not- maybe I’m not really supposed to be here,”

“Maybe.” Wilbur replied back simply, for Tommy had reduced him back to a wordless man once again, and he had a feeling that Tommy was right.

That was the thing, wasn’t it? He was always somehow right in the end.

___

The thing with enigmas is that they do not dissipate and disappear with ease. They are bright, they burn with a heat and fire that could rival any burning star or sun, and they are seen, forever seen and heard and felt. Enigmas start lives and start planets, they start worlds and end them too, they twist and turn the paths of life and watch the world collapse in on itself as the Earth spins on and on. They scatter themselves across the sky and across the dirt, freckles on skin, blood upon teeth and words upon walls. Enigmas tell the stories and some never finish, forever existing and repeating and reforming, forever telling and telling.

It starts with Wilbur and Tommy together.

It ends with them together, telling and telling. Burning and shining, and never quite finished.

For there is a maybe.

A not finished.

Not yet.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> man.
> 
> I definitely did not expect it to turn out as long as it did, but honestly I'm proud of how it turned out! So pog :D
> 
> hopefully someone will spot the teeny literary reference I made, but probs not lmao.
> 
> And also just wanted to point out that the reason Schlatt didn't feel much when Wilbur died is because they didn't have a huge emotional connection, whereas, Wilbur does with Tommy, so his death hurts him more.
> 
> anyways- I'm writing other dsmp and mcyt stuff, so there's that :] if you wanna come vibe with me, I'm mostly active on Tumblr @jjcantfuckingwrite where I mostly just rant and vibe, so come hang out there if you like [:
> 
> kudos and comments are really appreciated! I love talking to all you funky peeps :D <33


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